Be Prepared

I enter a lot of book give-away contests and I've been fortunate enough to win several this year. The latest one is called Desperate Ransom by Minton Sparks. It is such a cool little book...written about her rural Southern family...in sort of poems, but not typical poetry by any means. Each little story is only one or two pages, so it's a quick read.

The author tells a story about her Mee Maw, who thought that "Thou Shalt Be Prepared" should be the 11th commandment and always warned of the danger of not having clean, presentable underwear in case calamity struck. One day a storm blew through and when it was all over, a neighbor woman was stuck in a tree. As they all stood around the tree looking up, "...the worst of what we saw wasn't the bloody cuts or bruising poor Sadie bore. No, what shocked us most was the tattered and holey underwear she wore." Her Mee Maw flew into a cleaning frenzy, then she dashed to town and came home with a pair of cobalt blue, silk panties. "And to this very day, anytime the sky looks threatening or the winds get high, Mee Maw steals off to her bedroom dresser and steps into what are now affectionately referred to by all of us as 'Mee Maw's Tornado Drawers'."

OMG...I laughed so hard when I read that! It sounds like something my mother would have done! She always warned us girls of the dangers of not wearing presentable underwear. Now that I think about it, maybe all mothers give their daughters the same speech. Is that a chapter in the mother's instruction handbook? Since I have a daughter of my own now, I guess I should start fine tuning my own speech, huh? Okay BK, we need to talk...